Broken Embraces

"Raising Caine" or "Eyesight to the Blind"

Harry Caine (Lluís Homar) is a writer of screenplays in Madrid, semi-content to take on the occasional assignment his former production assistant Judit (Blanca Portillo) gives him and to pick up the occasional stranger who helps him across the street. Harry happens to be blind, and that he writes for a visual medium is just one of the ambiguities that inform "Broken Embraces" (or "Los Abrazos Rotos"), the latest film of Pedro Almodóvar that, like Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," is a valentine to the movies.

Maybe it's more like a box of dark chocolates. Multi-layered, with movies within movies and a story told mostly in flashbacks and first-person narration, it's a film noir in candy-colors (like the Andy Warhol prints of firearms in the heavy's house), and interlocking human triangles that make up the chain of the movie.* Running throughout are the Almodovar themes of dual identity, parental issues and role-playing (but no sexual ambiguity here, he keeps this story fairly hard-boiled), but it comes back to the art of seeing, and illusion, and seeing and creating illusion.

And Penelope Cruz. But, let's back-track.

On the day when a wealthy industrialist, Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) dies, Harry gets an appointment with a film-maker (he claims to have made a documentary fourteen years ago) named Ray X (Rubén Ochandiano), who wants Harry to collaborate on a screenplay. Given the scenario, Harry refuses and X is tossed out by Diego (Tamar Novas), Harry's assistant and typist (and Judit's son). An accident to Diego while his mother is away, puts the two men together in a mutually care-giving relationship, and Diego asks him about Mateo Blanco.

Mateo Blanco, you see, was another life. "Harry Caine" is a pseudonym that Blanco lives and writes under now. And over the course of the film, "Harry" tells Diego about the complicated story that led up to the day that Blanco lost his sight, his life and his love. It involves Magdalena Rivas (Penélope Cruz), secretary to Martel, and in a past life, a call-girl. A family crisis puts "Lena" in Martel's debt and she becomes his mistress, and he provides her anything money can buy...except freedom. Lena desires to be an actress, and one day she auditons for Mateo, who becomes enchanted with her.

There's a lot more to tell, but you can probably guess a lot of it, if you've seen a few movies out of the past. Almodovar isn't breaking any new ground this time, but he is tilling rich story-telling soil, the kind that binds screenwriters to Fate, for Good or Ill, and produced the films that made him fall in love with The Movies.

And movie-making. The film that the film's Mateo is fussing over is highly reminiscent of one of Almodovar's own films (right down to the...uh...cast), and his perverse humor knows there's not much difference between a controlling lover and a controlling director. Lena is a pawn in both men's game, and when being pulled in two directions something's gotta give...or be taken.

It's familiar stuff, but one more opportunity for Almodovar to have fun with the house of mirrors that is cinema. And one more opportunity to work and reflect a different aspect of his current Muse, Penelope Cruz. In his last film, "Volver," Cruz was an earthy Sophia Loren. Here, she's Audrey Hepburn...well, that's how Mateo molds her for the film (in a scene highly reminiscent of this blog-post by Almodovar about the film's prep). There's another more tragic icon that's touched on. One that the public embraced, and who loved the attention it brought her. And who learned too late that to be embraced also means to be held, constricted and restricted. Things cost.

Cruz and Almodovar show how it's done.

* At one point, Penelope Cruz is festooned with the most elaborate gold jewelry that almost looks like an elaborate horse harness. Makes one consider whether any jewelry is a form of "tack."

Bad Education

"Bad Education" aka "La mala educación" (Pedro Almodóvar, 2005) You immediately begin to snicker when the credits come up; it's Almodóvar in full Hitchcock mode with a Saul Bass-inspired credit sequence that rips across the screen bi-secting it again and again, indicating that the film will be about Hitchcockian dualities. But Almodóvar cleverly takes it a few steps further, dividing and dividing until you're not sure what's real.

It is, after all, just a movie.

A director (Fele Martínez) is in a creative doldrum, searching through tabloids for a story to inspire a new film. Fortunately, there's a knock at the door and in walks old school chum Ignacio Rodriguez (Gael García Bernal). But more than that, Ignacio was the director's first love in Catholic grade school. Their initial welcome and wave of nostalgia is tamped down when Ignacio tells him he's an actor and has a story to peddle. "There's nothing less erotic than an actor looking for work," says the director after the door has hit his friend in the butt on his way out.

Then he reads the story (illustrated by Almodóvar by changing the film's aspect ratio—not the last time he'll do that in this film). It's of Ignacio's grade school crush on the director and his molestation by lit teacher Fr. Manolo, and Ignacio's further blackmailing of the priest for his past crimes.

Intrigued with the story, and with just a touch of revenge in mind, the director decides to film the script, even allowing Ignacio—who insists on being called by his stage name "Angel"—to star.

Then things get complicated in a very bizarre fashion. For the director, recreating a story twice removed proves complicated. Even more, he finds the exception to the rule of truth being stranger than fiction.

Almodóvar loves film, not only for its story-telling ability, but also as its illustrative of other realities and the imagination, which he exploits in this film to the fullest. But, more, the man loves movies; in "Bad Education" he not only pays homage to Hitchcock and his disciple Brian DePalma (who could have easily made this story), but also Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir, and Mario Camus. That love fosters this movie within a movie within a movie until reality and fiction telescopes down a long rectangular rabbit-hole. At what point do fictions within fictions stop reflecting reality?

As Hitchcock famously said, "Ingrid, it's only a movie!"

Volver

"Volver" (Pedro Almodovar, 2006) Almodovar film about the prevailing myth-making of Family, and the resiliency and strength of women. In the course of it, Raimunda (Penelope Cruz, far better and livelier than any of her Hollywood films) has her entire world--her ENTIRE world--turned upside down, as her family structure--maybe that should be stricture--crumbles around her, and she must turn her back on tending to the dead--except for that pesky secret in the freezer downstairs--and concentrate on the living by, ironically, embracing the past. Then, and only then, can she be prepared for a miracle of sorts, the "coming back" of the title. It's a film that celebrates independence and family and is far less controversial than a lot of Almodovar's past work, but full of great film-making choices, including some sequences of suspense that rival those of Hitchcock.